The stories in James Claffey's Blood a Cold Blue are very short--most less than two pages long. A few are just a paragraph; some composed of a single, winding sentence. Each is a separate, fully realized morsel, and each is better than the last. It's hard to know where to pause for breath, but read them all at once and you run the risk of rushing past the luscious, inspired sentences and riveting imagery.
Many of the stories take place in Claffey's native Ireland. Others are set in his adopted home of California, or somewhere very much like it. In the U.S., Elvis's voice screeches from the radio and summer is "rippled and barbaric." The American stories have a bright, grotesque edge to them, distinct from the shimmering, surreal wonder of the Irish world that Claffey has "known and forgotten now, all this life-long later." His writing feels deeply autobiographical, and his narrators' voices ring with a hard-earned history. These are stories to savor and devour.
Claffey's lilting, circuitous prose blends an almost conversational tone with a Joycean attention to the malleable beauty of the written word. In "Ireland in Four Acts," he writes of "a cabin in Sligo, brass tub, the shining carapace of an old typewriter." A nameless writer will sit there and "vote for meaning, tap the ampersand." Claffey himself is in the business of "voting for meaning," of describing the joy and horror of life's bruised and bristling underbelly. --Emma Page, bookseller at Wellesley Books